Many modern appliances, consumer devices, and other devices include embedded systems that are configured to perform one or more dedicated functions. However, most embedded systems of such devices do not include networking capabilities, role based access control capabilities, remote interface capabilities, remote control capabilities, or related capabilities. Designing such functionality into an embedded system, designing application programming interfaces (APIs) for accessing such functionality, designing web services capable of communicating with and controlling the embedded system via this added functionality, and designing applications for taking advantage of this functionality can consume considerable resources of the device manufacturer.
Moreover, most consumer devices follow a life-cycle in which the functionality of the consumer devices are defined, the consumer devices are developed, the consumer devices are manufactured, and finally the consumer devices are sold and deployed to customer locations. The behaviors of such consumer devices are typically hard coded into the consumer devices. Accordingly, the functionality and behaviors of the consumer devices cannot be modified after they have been deployed to a customer location. Additionally, the time frame for product development of conventional consumer devices can be very long (e.g., on the order of 6 months to a year in some instances).